Kaede
The central character of the Elfen Lied series. The so-called 'Queen' Diclonius, Kaede (also known as Lucy and Nyu) was both ruthlessly tormented and a sadistic tormentor, driven by both the cruelty she found so often in life but also by the knowledge that love and acceptance was possible. Her great love was Kouta, a boy she met when they were children and again when they were young adults. Elfen Lied is in essence defined by her love for and relationship with Kouta, marked by some joy but also by deepest tragedy. As a Diclonius, Kaede possessed power rivaled by few others of her kind, and control over her vectors, mostly invisible telekinetic 'arms', virtually second to none. She was also capable of spreading the Diclonius mutation to the children born to people she infected, with the idea of replacing normal Humans with her kind. Birth Kaede's mother was a Human capable of giving birth to fully-powered and reproductive-capable Diclonius (as opposed to the sterile Silpelit children ), and was apparently the true origin of the virus that spawned them. Captured by Chief Kakuzawa Kaede's mother was held, studied and forced to bear a son by him, committing suicide after this. Kaede knew nothing of this, believing both parents had abandoned her. In fact, only her father had, while her mother never stopped searching for her, prior to her capture by Kakuzawa. It remains unclear if Chief Kakuzawa knew of Kaede's existence before others did,so the timeframe of the conception and birth of Kaede's half-brother is also uncertain. She was taken in by an orphanage, where she was avoided by the staff, commonly bullied and referred to as an "Oxen" (due to her horns) and told by the other children that she should live outside. In an odd way, Kaede/Lucy understood this as the other children being miserable and needing to make others miserable as well. First Killings Kaede found an abandoned puppy in the woods around the orphanage, whom she thought of as her first friend. Feeding the puppy on breadcrumbs left the pup starving, so she felt forced to give most of her dinner to it. When a boy named Tomoo threw milk all over her bag, a young girl saw, and shouted for a teacher. Thinking of her as a new friend, Kaede told the girl about the puppy. However, although promising to keep it a secret, the girl told the boys about Kaede's relationship with the puppy, and the bullies took it from the woods. Grabbing hold of Kaede, the boys brought in the puppy and began killing it by repeatedly smashing a vase on it. The girl came in, admitting to telling them about the puppy. Despite her apologies and protests that she hadn't known the puppy would be hurt, Kaede spotted her smiling behind her supposedly covered eyes. Feeling betrayed and enraged, she released her vectors for the first time, killing all of her tormentors. She then buried the dog, apologizing for not being able to protect it, and decided to go on the run. Kouta While she stood at the grave, a young boy arrived. Thinking he would just hurt her more, she prepared to kill him. However, he did not intend to cause harm, and promptly tried to befriend her, even calling her horns cool. The two had fun on their first day and the boy Kouta, promised he would see her again the next day. However, news of the deaths of the children she killed caused Kouta's father not to let him out. It would be another two days before he would be able to see her again, and he apologized for not seeing her earlier. During the nights, Kaede went with her Diclonius instincts and slaughtered entire families to stay in their houses. The murders became more and more publicised and she found it harder to stay at a house for very long. At odd moments, the horror of what she was doing would strike her, but her pain and need reasserted itself in short order. She met Kouta again, where they went to the zoo. Her fascination with animals she had never had the chance to know of (such as Elephants and Giraffes) surprised Kouta, and he took delight in her joy from this. They grew very close, and she exacted a promise from him to kill her if someday she had to be killed to save people. When she learned he was to go to a nearby festival, she begged to go with him, but he said that his cousin was going with him. Suddenly jealous, Kaede asked Kouta whether his cousin was a boy or a girl. Not wishing to hurt her feelings, Kouta lied and said his cousin was a boy. She nonetheless went to the festival, only to feel betrayed by yet another friend by finding out that his cousin, Yuka was actually a girl. In a rage, she began killing several people. This was reported later as a bomb attack, though Kouta's little sister Kanae, who had the extraordinary gift to see her vectors, ran away to tell Kouta. With summer and their visit over, Kouta and his family boarded a train. Kanae kept telling Kouta about the murders, even as Kaede emerged into their car on the moving train. Kouta angrily denied Kanae's account that Kaede could be responsible. Kaede ripped Kanae in half and beheaded her and Kouta's father, telling the horrified Kouta that Yuka was next, but still wanting to be with him. In grief and rage, Kouta began assaulting her, telling her to stop killing. Kaede realized that, far from making Kouta love only her, she had done something unforgivable and perhaps pushed him away forever. While she ran away, she privately vowed to live for no other reason than one day returning to apologize to Kouta. Capture Kaede laid low and hid for the next five years, moving about only at night. The majority of her victims would suffer heart attacks after her vectors damaged their blood vessels. As these murders and the instance of Silpelit births multiplied geometrically over these years in Kamakura, Kaede's birthplace and one-time home, Kurama and Kakuzawa pieced this information together with information with the Festival and orphanage murders caused by Kaede/Lucy. When a picture of Kaede, who was listed as missing and presumed kidnapped during the orphanage killings, came into their hands, her horns revealed her identity and a direct pursuit was begun.. Kaede befriended a young girl named Aiko Takada who liked to draw. Aiko too, was lonely, dealing with an abusive father and hoping to reunite with the mother who abandoned her. When Aiko accidentally killed her enraged father, the two were accused of murder and ran away from the scene, hoping that the girl could see her mother, who was having an art show at the nearby museum, again. After hiding in the museum, Kurama found them two and ordered the forces with him to open fire. Aiko jumped in the way of the gunfire to save Kaede's life. In exchange for a promise of immediate medical attention for Aiko, Kaede surrendered to Kurama. After being imprisoned within the Diclonius Research Institute (National Research Institute on Human EvolutionInnermost Feelings ~ Herzenswärme, page 185) Kaede was informed that Aiko had died from her wounds. Kurama asserted that she could have lived had they simply given up, and that Humans only wanted the Diclonius race to co-exist with them. Kaede refutes this, stating that nothing Humans did indicated wanting co-existence. As vengeance for Aiko's death, Kaede promised Kurama that, if she were ever to escape, she would kill everyone who mattered to him. Escape During her three year imprisonment, Kaede was encased in a metal cage within a containment chamber, and the name "Lucy" was commonly used by the researchers, again in reference to a fossil find. It was also possibly a reference to Lucifer, as she and the other Diclonius were often regarded as monsters and demons. She occasionally repeated her vow to Kurama, amending it to say she would leave him alive to suffer. From time to time, a guard or scientist would stray too close to her containment chamber, and she would kill them. One day, a security guard dropped his mobile phone within her strike zone, and Lucy used it to cut his arm off, and in his resulting panic, killed him. The man possessed a key to the cell, which she retrieved and unlocked. The conditions for this opportunity were later revealed to be part of a plan by Professor Kakuzawa. Now free, she made her escape, slaughtering tens if not dozens of security guards. Eventually she found Kurama and a group of guards, fully armed and standing within a perimeter not to her advantage. Kurama's secretary Kisaragi clumsily entered the room and was taken hostage by Lucy. Lucy then pulled her head from her body, and used her body as a shield against gunfire. Combined with her vectors, this turned back the gunfire. Killing off the guards, she left Kurama alone as part of her promise. She made her way to the exit, and prepared to jump off a cliffside to leave the island. Kurama had a guard use a .50 caliber rifle to fire at the back of Lucy's head, which in theory would kill her instantly. However, she turned her head towards the sharpshooter just before it was fired. This resulted in the bullet hitting her restraining helmet instead. The force of the projectile knocked her unconscious, and into the sea. Nyu Lucy fell into the ocean and drifted onto shore. By sheer coincidence, she happened to have been found by Kouta (unable to remember her and the killings) and Yuka, who were walking along the same beach. Because of the blow to the head she had suffered, she developed a childlike personality, a girl only able to make the sound Nyu , which is the name they gave her. Prone to groping both male and female residents of the Maple house, Nyu also knew little of hygiene or other forms of restraint. On occasion, the Lucy personality would re-emerge, as it did during her brutal battles with Bando and Nana. Despite these outbreaks and occasional disappearances (including being held by Chief Kakuzawa's ambitous son,Professor Kakuzawa, who indicated that he too was a Diclonius) she tended to live in peace as Nyu with the other residents, including Nozomi as well as Nana. The Nyu and Kaede sides of her psyche kept Lucy from ever harming Kouta and also Yuka, whose loss she knew Kouta would never forgive. Lucy re-emerged once again during her and Nana's battle with Mariko, and marked the first time she lost her horns. For a time, this seemed to cause the Nyu personality to not only predominate, but to mature into that of a young woman who still had many of Nyu's mannerisms. Nana, at first hostile to Nyu for the loss of her limbs in battle, eventually accepted that Nyu and Lucy were two different people. During another battle with Bando and the Unknown Man, Mayu, who had witnessed the first battle between Lucy and Nana, regained her memories of Nana's dismemberment, for which Lucy, albeit reluctantly, prepared to kill her. Bando stopped this at the cost of mortal wounds, again shooting off her horns. Confronted for the first time with the idea of Lucy's existence, Nyu was eventually persuaded to return to Kaede House, where a joyful dinner was interrupted by an assault team led by Nousou and the Agent and backed up by three clones that were bred from Mariko's DNA. With her friends harassed and wounded and Kouta shot, Nyu regrew her horns instantly and gained the ability to use vectors without becoming Lucy. Her actions during this battle had the side effect of restoring Kouta's lost memories of how his family died and the fact that Kaede as Lucy had killed them. Angry and grief-stricken, she wiped out nearly the entire assault force, but was taken down by the Agent and a dying Mariko clone. From there she was taken back to the island facility and kept in an underground grotto, and at last confronted Chief Kakuzawa. The End This confrontation was the beginning of the end for Kaede's journey. Chief Kakuzawa revealed that he too was of Diclonius descent, and that all his efforts to seemingly harm the Diclonii were in fact part of a master plan to ensure their dominance and replacement of non-horned Humans. He also introduced Kaede to her half-brother, his own son by Kaede's mother and to his mind, her mate as they recreated the Diclonius race, also ensuring the new race was of his line. He also revealed that continual use of her powers was slowly destroying her body. Kaede killed Kakuzawa, her half-brother and seemingly the mutated Anna Kakuzawa as well. Speaking to Chief Kakuzawa's corpse, she hatefully rejected his plans, saying that not only were Diclonius Human after all, but that he and his family had mistaken a minor genetic mutation (horns on the heads of many of their clan) for being true Diclonii. To her half-brother's corpse, she apologized, saying that even though he had done nothing wrong, their line must end, and would with what she saw as her now-inevitable death. Evading armed forces from various nations, some equipped with vector-based weapons, she made for the mainland, determined to see Kouta again before she died. Allied forces, Kurama and Nana, and a recovering Kouta himself made for Kaede's position. Kaede at last apologized to Kouta for killing his family, also explaining that an inner voice, that of her own DNA, drove her to the horrible things she did. Breaking her heart, Kouta made it explicitly clear that he would never forgive Kaede for murdering Kanae and their father. He also firmly rejected her explanation of a DNA voice, saying all people dealt with such a thing. But he did care for her as Nyu enough to offer to let her continue to stay with them at Kaede House, provided she never killed again. Attacks by Kurama and armed soldiers made keeping this vow impossible, and also began to dissolve her body from overuse of her powers. Faced with a choice of destroying the world that had caused her so much pain and saving Kouta, whose wounds had been worsened unto death, she turned all her remaining energy into healing him. As her body began to literally fall apart before his eyes, Kouta was given a gun and urged to fulfil his childhood promise to kill her before the DNA persona emerged and tried to again destroy the world. The Kaede and Nyu personalities held this other one back, but Kouta found that he could not kill his old friend, no matter how she wronged him. Before fading, Kaede urged him to return each year to where they first met, and one day, she would be waiting for him. The most vicious personality now had full control, but was in such incredible pain that it placed the gun in Kouta's hands, and in a mix of mercy and vengeance, then Kouta killed the girl he knew as Nyu. Even without their Queen and with an anti-Diclonius birth vaccine being distributed in the midst of a total worldwide birth ban, the remaining Diclonius were years in being taken down, and killed many Humans before it was all done. In the intervening years, Kouta returned to the spot where he met Nyu as a child on the anniversary of that day. In one such instance, he arrived in the company of his daughter Nyuu, whom he named after his fallen friend, and who looked much like her presumed mother, Yuka. Speaking of playing there as a child, Kouta found with little Nyuu's help, a note inside a bottle in the area around the large stone near the grave of Kaede's puppy. It was a heartfelt note from Kaede, who expressed her love and desire from early on to marry him. It was also the first time he learned Kaede's true name. Little Nyuu told her father that she had been playing with twin girls in that area, and that one of them was named Kaede. The twins, not fully seen but looking a lot like Kaede as a child, smiled at Kouta and told him they had been waiting for their special friend, which brought Kouta to tears of joy. It is strongly implied that the two good personas in Kaede have been reincarnated into these young girls. If one counts Lucy and Nyu as separate from Kaede, then perhaps even little Nyuu herself is part of this rebirth. Trivia *Kaede means 'Maple' in English; Note this name is never used except at the very end of the manga; she is known largely as Nyu to her friends, and as Lucy to her pursuers. *Lucy is the name given to an Australopithecus fossil find of immense importance, and likely played a role in Kakuzawa's renaming of Kaede, though this is never confirmed in-series. *Kaede's Diclonius instincts appear as a bandaged Diclonius in the anime; In the manga, it appears as a hate-twisted version of the little girl she was when first betrayed. *In the anime finale, Kaede told Nana to leave for Kaede house so she could live a life that she couldn't. *The word Nyu is actually very similar to how the word cow is spelt in Japan. Since the bullies at the orphange called her an oxen this may be why she spoke that word. It also has an 'echhi' connotation as slang for breasts, which as Nyu Kaede frequently groped, even in her 'mature' persona. *The anime's end is left for the viewer to decided whether Kaede or Nyu is the one at the door. Many fans believe that Kaede killed her Lucy persona so Kouta could live with Nyu. But it could be either since she can swap personalities when she falls unconscious. The name Kaede never appears in the anime, where in the English dub Kaede House is called Maple Inn. *Kaede appears taller than Nyu when standing. *"Nyu" or "Nyaa" is the sound a cat makes in Japan. *Neither anime nor manga ever makes clear the extent to which Kaede (or other Diclonii) were naturally prone to kill Humans and how much of it was reciprocated hate and self-defense. Gallery DSC01234.JPG|Enraged at the shooting of Kouta Lucy PVC.JPG|A very rare Lucy miniature Nyu PVC.JPG|A very rare Nyu miniature (different interchangeable head from Lucy) DSC01287.JPG|Nyu manga color shot Lucylastmessage.JPG|The message that proved her love for Kouta sources Category:Diclonius Category:Main characters